I used to blog. Back in the early years of blogdom, I blogged about my trip through the wonders of cancer treatment, and about my newly minted lawyer blues. I used to have the rhythm down, and the mildly ironic stance, and all that. But I lost it! I lost it! And I can’t get it back. It’s actually a relief. Now I can blog the way Nature intended–without whimsy, without hundreds of hyperlinks and cute pictures. I’m not going to dive into the question of whether Nature ever intended a blog. Watch crows for clues on blogging. They blog regularly in fields, backyards and garbage dumps near you. They describe dead animals, live ones who interest them, the contents of dumpsters, and probably your new hairdo. They’re good bloggers–vivid and urgent and absolutely not whimsical.
Like the real viiceralists. Real viceralistas actually. And who are they?
I just finished reading Los Detectives Salvajes by Roberto Bolaño. In Los Detectives, several young poets in Mexico, DF (Mexico City), go on a quest to find an obscure (and fictional) poet of the 1920s (post-revolution in Mexico) named Cesária Tinajero, supposedly the first real visceralist. “Real viceralismo” is a literary movement, also fictional, but based on a movement invented by Bolaño and Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, called infrarrealismo.
Infrarrealismo came from surrealism or dadaism, which means it had that “protest” stance. Like the other two, infrarrealismo sought to “volarle la tapa de los sesos a la cultura oficial”–“blow open the brains of official culture.” Kinda like punk. By that I mean that there’s something named “Rock” or something named “Poetry” that everyone agrees on–it’s “official.” Each has its agreed-upon education, techniques, connections, gurus, stances, words, subjects, and even rebels. Then, in the case of Rock, along come the Ramones and play 3 chords wham wham wham over and over and say the same 5 words over and over for 2.5 minutes. This at a time when you had all these long and almost symphonic concept albums with strings and epic drum solos and guitar meanderings for 40 minutes at a time. And then here’s 2.5 minutes of 3 chords and the Ramones have volar-ed your sesos. (volar = fly, sesos = brains).
The rush of that kind of audacity and urgency is, I think, very much what all artistic protest movements intend. Like crows dropping entrails onto peacocks in an icy wind. It never lasts. Never lasts.
So, the infrarrealistas (which movement, incidentally, lived and died in the 1970s, just like punk), sought to do that with poetry.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t succeed–if success means a place in any kind of canon. I could be wrong–after all, the surrealists did get their encyclopedia page. But Bolaño did succeed, not as a poet, but as a fiction writer. And we’re all very lucky he did. Los Detectives is an amazing book. Here’s your link, English version, and link, Spanish version, in case you wanna buy it, and contribute to Mr. Bolaño’s estate. (He died in 2003, RIP). Look for my review coming soon to this very website–under “Reading”.